But a funny thing happened this weekend at these "America Speaks" events. Members of the public, after being given what Roger Hickey calls "misleading background information about the federal deficit and economic options to achieve fiscal 'balance' and future prosperity," got a chance to weigh in on what they thought the most prudent course of action might be. As Thomas Frank points out in the Wall Street Journal today (6/30/10; subscription required), the results were likely a huge disappointment to Peterson: [...] Read more»

Unsurprisingly, Rohter would not seem to be embarrassed at all, judging his reply email, which FAIR has received:

Dear Mr. Fuentes:

Actually, it's Oliver Stone and company who need to heed your advice. I've been scrupulously honest in my reporting and writing, and they are offended and embarrassed at having their many errors and inaccuracies disclosed. Rather than owning up to those mistakes, they've chosen to double down and up the ante. Where they might merely have been mistaken before, they are now lying outright, the letter you link to below being the prime example.

Don't take my word for it. I urge you to go back and look at what Stone and his screenwriters are saying in that letter. As regards the issue of U.S. oil imports from OPEC countries, for example, go ahead and click on the two links that Stone & Weisbrot provide and look at the numbers contained there. You will see that the United States has imported more oil from Saudi Arabia than Venezuela every year since 2000. So no matter how Stone and company want to slice, dice bend or twist it, the assertion they make in the film about U.S. oil imports is simply wrong. The numbers are clear and indisputable.

Same thing goes for the 1998 Venezuela presidential race. The numbers don't lie: Irene Saez got only 3 percent of the vote, compared to 40 percent for Henrique Salas Romer, yet she is Chavez's "main opponent" and he is not? Let's apply that same pretzel logic to some other elections and see what we come up with. Was George Bush's "main opponent" in 2000 Al Gore or Ralph Nader? Was Harry Truman's "main opponent" in 1948 Thomas E. Dewey or the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond? Was Jimmy Carter's "main opponent" in 1980 Ronald Reagan or John Anderson?

It's also worthwhile using a little bit of simple logic to analyze the issue of the Cochabamba water privatization. Tariq Ali's argument seems to be that there is no substantial difference between a sale and a 40 year lease. Granted that the notion of private ownership may be anathema to someone with his ideological leanings, and therefore his understanding of different property regimens may be flawed. But the outright sale of an asset is not the same as granting a concession to use that asset for a fixed period of time, as anyone who has ever leased a car knows well. The devil is in the details, and Stone and company have chosen to ignore those. I could subject each of their other wild and erroneous claims to the same kind of dissection for you, but I trust you get the picture from the examples I've cited. Thank you for writing.

Talk about doubling down.

Rohter, for some reason, decided that this passing comment in the film deserved to be debunked: "We import more oil from Venezuela than any other OPEC nations." As the film makes clear, that comment was made by an oil industry analyst in a 2002 TV appearance, though Rohter's Times piece oddly cited 2004-10 data to contradict him. Stone and co. cite 1997-2001 as a more relevant time frame; in that period, the United States did in fact buy more oil from Venezuela than from Saudi Arabia (though in 2000-01, Saudi Arabia was the bigger supplier). [...] Read more»

But the way the New York Times handled the matter is worth a look. The paper's June 19 piece, "On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas," should have told a simple story: Supporters of the law claimed that Arizona was seeing a dramatic increase in crime, and immigrants were to blame for this. This is simply not true. But in the name of journalistic balance, the Times opted for a "both sides are doing it" framing.

Times reporter Randal Archibald went to an academic who talked about this:

What social psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize information that does not. There is no better example than the role of crime in Arizona's tumultuous immigration debate.

So what is reality, then? Turns out it's complicated:

Crime figures, in fact, present a more mixed picture, with the likes of Russell Pearce, the Republican state senator behind the immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while immigrant advocacy groups like Coalicion de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem.

The Times explains that overall crime has been dropping in Arizona, as it has in most big cities. But there's the other side:

But the rate for property crime, the kind that people may experience most often, increased in the state, to 4,082 per 100,000 residents in 2008 from 3,682 in 2000. Preliminary data for 2009 suggests that this rate may also be falling in the state's biggest cities.

So the lesson apparently is that local officials who tell scare stories about immigrant crime aren't to be believed. But don't believe the pro-immigration crowd, either; they're being selective as well.

Turn to the Times yesterday, though, and you read this:

Correction: June 27, 2010

An article last Sunday about the debate over immigration reform and how people's perceptions sometimes run counter to crime statistics misstated the change in property crimes in Arizona between 2000 and 2008. The number of property crimes went down, not up.

[...] Read more»